


Eternal Return

by Mosca



Category: Make It or Break It
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:19:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sasha is twice Payson's age, but eventually the mathematics of their lives will resolve that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eternal Return

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sev313](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sev313/gifts).



> Go Wolverines!
> 
> Thanks to my fabulous betas, [Anna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/anna/pseuds/anna) and Thistle.

**Eternal Return**

The real Lolita was repulsive. She was thirteen and chewed gum with her mouth open; she had crooked teeth and a weird eye and no manners. Humbert Humbert was in love with her because his obsession was like a drug, not because the girl was seductive or special, and that was the point.

When Lauren Tanner was setting Sasha up to trap him, she warned him with a taunt. "Have you read _Lolita_? Have you read it in the _original_?"

"Yes, I do speak fluent English," he sneered, happy to shrink her for a few seconds. Some athletes need a coach who can make them feel smaller, and he needled Lauren Tanner any way he could, turning that mirror right back on her. She made fewer mistakes when she didn't like herself, because introspection made her careful.

Nabokov fell in love with English because he could mold it into what he wanted but only if he was willing to fight it, stretch it, torment it, give back as hard as it resisted. Coaching Payson was like falling in love with English.

Payson would be eighteen soon, and he wouldn't feel like a criminal anymore. A moral monster, but within the law. And not even an unusual monster. USAG had finally gotten around to banning Don Peters, for goodness sake. Stand around in a gym all day with young girls in leotards, touching them to correct their movements, and something was bound to come up.

Sasha clasped his hands behind his back when he worked with Payson. He squeezed his own wrists so hard, he looked like he'd been trapped in handcuffs.

He sent her to London. Payson and Kaylie Cruz were the two Rock girls to make the Olympic team, and Payson wasn't the star. In the team finals, Ellen Beals only used Payson on floor, even though Payson had qualified to the event finals in beam as well. Kelly Parker fell off the beam; the Chinese took the team gold; Sasha glowered voiceless from the bench. After the medal ceremony, Payson ran up to Sasha, holding her silver up to her face, grinning the way she never managed to for the press. "Olympic medalist!"

A few days later, she earned a gold on floor and a surprise bronze on beam. One in every color.

Back in Boulder, Payson announced her retirement from elite competitive gymnastics by appearing at his door with a dozen doughnuts. Doughnuts her downfall, and also his: every gymnast had a sweet tooth weakness, and theirs the same, like sharing a birthday. He opened a bottle of Prosecco. She kissed him, tilting wine onto his shirt.

She was eighteen, and she was no longer his student. They'd played it right. Not enough to avoid reproach, so they kept quiet, but enough that one limping attempt at scandal fizzled into the wind. The NGC had moved on to the future stars of 2016, and the press had moved on to Kaylie, who'd brought home Olympic all-around gold and taken it straight to the bank of Dancing With the Stars. Payson was old at eighteen.

Payson had been old as long as Sasha had known her. The day he'd met her, he'd sent her into the gym to tell the adults to stop behaving like children. Sasha's life had taught him weariness and resignation, the habits that looked like maturity, but Payson'd been born with them.

"I have to get ready for college," Payson told him nonchalantly, as if she was off to fix her hair before a date. She went to public high school in the morning and trained in the afternoon, and the NCAA scouts came around, pleased to have an Olympian to fight over. Sasha made it clear he had nothing to say to them. He had future stars of 2016 to train.

Payson didn't tell him when she was ready to have sex with him, although he would have expected that bluntness from her. She didn't buy lingerie and pretend to seduce him, which also wouldn't have surprised him, a moment of awkwardness that he would have laughed over and guided in a less humiliating direction. Instead, when they were together, she let him know when to stop, and one night, she didn't stop him. He hesitated anyway. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

"The hurdle was _kissing_ you," she said. "At this point, we're just putting it off."

Their first few nights together left him wishing they'd put it off longer. He couldn't help treating her like a porcelain doll, and she couldn't help micromanaging. They ended up naked and shouting at one another, not even arguing, not even saying anything, making noise. Until she fell quiet, giggling and covering her mouth, shaking her head. "Your penis turns red when you're angry."

"Well," he replied, "it's where the blood goes."

"How would I know? I don't know anything. And you won't tell me. You won't tell me how to do it right."

"I'm not your coach," he said. "I can't be. Not at the same time I'm your -"

He couldn't decide how to finish that sentence, and Payson didn't help him. But she held him.

Practice and determination were Payson's twin obsessions, and Sasha let her rain them onto him. She got good at going down on him, and he understood why: she could keep control of him and of herself. She didn't fake orgasms, and she didn't seem to mind not having them. She didn't know what she was missing. Sasha feared making her feel inadequate and alienating her, feared trying.

She was busy. She had to earn a minimum SAT score if she wanted to compete in collegiate gymnastics, and despite her natural intelligence, she told him she was afraid. Meanwhile, instead of studying, she traveled to the top NCAA universities, trying out and taking tours. "If I let enough of them try to seduce me, the pretty lies will all cancel each other out," she said.

He was busy, too. The gym had enjoyed an influx of new athletes after the Olympics, and hopefuls came in almost every day, to show their skills and be turned away. Others posted themselves on YouTube and emailed themselves to him, shaky cell phones wobbling their beam routines so that he thought the camera work might pitch them to the mats. And a few gems among them: a thirteen-year-old from California with a sky-high Amanar vault; a boy from Utah who, unlike most Americans, could get through a pommel horse routine with a D score above 6.00. Sasha made the new recruits muster at five in the morning and yelled at them until mid-afternoon, and they suffered but they improved. He eavesdropped as they complained behind his back. They didn't have a Payson to remind them it'd all be worth the pain.

Payson went down to Georgia and came back with stories. UGA had been recruiting her hard. "That program's so full of religion, I had Summer flashbacks," she said, peeling off her bra as she arched backward onto Sasha's bed. "The coach asked me whether I had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And I was thinking, _Yeah, and there's been some domestic abuse._ I bit my tongue and told her it's private."

"That's for the best," Sasha said, his mind mostly on the rise and fall of her breasts.

"I think I'm going to verbally commit to Michigan. I liked the program, liked the girls. They need a team leader, and I think I could be that."

"Where the hell is Michigan?" Sasha hadn't gotten around to learning American geography. His pride in that ignorance was stubborn and European, and those qualities made him prouder of it.

"In the Midwest," Payson said. "A thousand miles away. I know. It's far. They're all far. UC and Colorado State don't have teams."

Sasha leaned down to kiss her. "We'll make the best of the time we have." He was a stop on her journey, not the destination. It wasn't her fault that she made him feel ready to stop wandering.

For seven months, he lived in the moment, her moment, her body and her strange, sarcastic smile. He got used to the feeling of loving her, until the emotion became a part of him.

He endured awkward dinners with her family. Kim and Mark were only a few years older than Sasha, and their attempts to include him felt like meetings about Payson's future. It was in the Rock office that Kim found a way to say, "I know you think I resent you, but I don't. I accept my alien daughter. I tried to imagine her with a boy her own age, and I really can't."

Sasha offered to drive Payson to college. It became a fantasy: rest stops and motels, alone together in small spaces. But she said, "I think I need to let my parents do that." So they had their break-up sex three days before she left for Michigan, trying so hard to make it special, freeze time, that it felt mournful and empty. "I won't stop loving you," she said. "I can't."

A lot of former elite gymnasts crumbled in the NCAA. In some ways, it was an entirely different sport: focused on the team rather than the individual, and on perfecting easier skills rather than risking hard ones, all of this built into the scoring and the training. Payson could stick a Yurchenko full like she was crossing the street, but the difficulty lay in _wanting_ to stick that Yurchenko full, feeling satisfied with it, not missing the double rotation.

In her freshman year, Payson called him all the time to talk about that feeling. Sasha was her coach again, or perhaps her gymnastics therapist. He wanted to hear her talk about gymnastics, and only that. He needed to keep himself away from the rest of her life, especially now that she seemed to have one. He found himself grateful when the calls slowed. He assumed that when she wasn't calling, she was at a party or writing a paper, kissing other men, having an easier time not thinking of him than he was not thinking of her.

He forced himself to seem to have a life of his own as well. It was foolish to believe he'd fall out of love with her so quickly, but he had to wear himself down. He dated women his own age. Single women in their late thirties all carried baggage of one kind or another, and so did he; he stared deeply into strangers' eyes over glasses of wine and wondered how much they were willing to settle for.

He looked around the gym and didn't see any sixteen-year-olds who captivated him like Payson did, either. That was a weak and tepid comfort.

On the phone during Payson's junior year, she told him hesitantly that she had a boyfriend. "A figure skater," she said. "Michigan's the ice dance capital of America. We have the Olympics in common." She said he was smart, and he thought she was funny and beautiful. Sasha didn't feel jealousy, but gratitude: grateful to this normal boy who could give Payson a normal romance.

Sasha updated his match.com profile and met a 36-year-old widow with two small children. She was lovely in a gluten-free, no-make-up, fleece-jacket way, and she admired Sasha with a strange and welcome seriousness. Sasha dated her with the kind of persistence he used to devote to upgrading his gymnastics skills, as if practice could make him love her perfectly. After nearly a year, it seemed like time to marry her.

He went to a jewelry store to buy the engagement ring but couldn't push himself past the door. He thought of the noise when doors slammed shut, and he couldn't shake the reverberation out of his ears. He couldn't close the door on Payson, and until he could, it wasn't fair for him to marry someone else. His girlfriend came to his trailer expecting a proposal and got a break-up speech instead, one of the terrible ones where it was Sasha's problem, not hers, and he hoped she could find a man who deserved her more than he did. With his false kindness, he bought finality.

Payson was finishing her last year of university. She was team captain, loudest voice on the floor, leader of the huddles. She'd brought Michigan to the top six at the NCAA Championships all four years, but never to a win, not even now, when it would have been both poetic and trite. She made the mistake of inviting Sasha to her graduation instead of NCAAs. Maybe she made it on purpose. Anyway, he went.

She followed him back to Boulder despite his insistence that she consider her options. "I've been considering them for four years," she said.

"What about your boyfriend?"

"Who?" Payson glared at him like she thought he was playing a joke on her. "Oh. Right. That was over _ages_ ago. I guess I didn't tell you. I didn't know how you'd feel."

"I would have been sorry it didn't work out," Sasha said.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Aren't you _engaged_ to someone?"

"I'm sorry that didn't work out, either," he said, too brightly, sarcasm failing to mask his elation at having left the door open.

"I'm not."

Sasha thought she was going to kiss him again, with the same shocking defiance she'd used to kiss him when she was a student. She'd lived two or three lifetimes since that caught-on-video kiss; she'd caught up with him.

He kissed first.

"I'm glad you did that," she said. "If you hadn't, I would have gone back to Michigan and started my own gym."

He took her on as an assistant coach and let her move into the Airstream for a few cramped months before they found a house big enough for the two of them. He didn't urge her to stay with her parents, and she never brought up the option. Unable to escape each other, arguing every time they opened their mouths, they had no choice but to have sex constantly whenever they were both in the trailer.

In bed, she was a different woman than the one he'd sent away to college. Whatever else she'd learned there, she'd gotten an education in men. She had a pair of red lace panties she wore around the trailer, just to see if he was paying attention, just to make sure. He closed the blinds on the tiny kitchen window, reaching over her head while she did the dishes, fitting his hand between red lace and smooth skin to finger her while she tried to brace herself with soapy hands. Her shrieks and the slam of her hips rattled the dishes. He made her come before he'd even unzipped his trousers, and he got himself hard kissing her powerful shoulders and squeezing breasts that had filled out in his absence. He liked her soft and sated, the pleasure subduing her.

There were parents who refused to let their daughters train with Sasha. Most of the time, they didn't say it outright: he heard about up-and-coming girls, competing level seven or eight and looking to move up, who tried out at every top gym but the Rock. One particular piece of work came up to him at a regional meet and said, "You should know I don't feel comfortable with you on the floor."

If one of his girls hadn't just fallen off the bars, he might not have snapped back, "Why? Because I'm dating a twenty-four-year-old woman?"

Later in the season, he was named head coach of the men's national team for Worlds. It was possible he was being sent a message, but it was also possible he'd coached the national gold and bronze medalists.

For Christmas, Payson and Sasha bought each other a house. Kim teased him with hints about an engagement ring, but Payson whispered, "Don't let her wear you down. I don't know what I'd say."

He didn't expect to sulk the whole way home. Payson picked up on it before bed and corrected herself: "I know what I'd say. I just don't know if I'm ready to say it." She tapped a stack of boxes like it was an apparatus, and she was scratching. "I feel like we're still packed up. Like we don't know what's inside ourselves."

"Then it's about time we unpacked," Sasha said.

"Maybe it's not who we are."

"Then we'll have to change. We'll have to fight for it. Because if we don't, we'll fall apart." Sasha had given Payson this kind of speech before, but she'd seemed smaller then, recovering from back surgery, learning her new floor routine. "I've done everything I could to live without you, and I'm convinced it's possible to do so, and that is why I am bloody well going to stick with you even if it drives me crazy. And I can't imagine expecting anything less from you."

"All right," she said. "I'll be your goddamned swan." She kissed him, and he held her, and there they stayed, the space between them infinitely narrowed.


End file.
